Heroes Of Might & Magic IV

No More Heroes

The Heroes Of Might & Magic series has always been something of
a triumph of gameplay over graphics, with an addictive combination
of role-playing and strategy elements overcoming the antiquated
visuals. With Heroes IV the franchise has had something of a
make-over, sporting updates to both graphics and gameplay, but
sadly the changes aren't always for the best.

Like previous games in the series, Heroes IV lets you control one
or more hero characters who wander around a map hoovering up
resources and artifacts, capturing towns and production centers,
and visiting special areas which can permanently or temporarily
boost their abilities. Maps are also dotted with neutral armies
which you must defeat to access new areas, and most missions
include one or more rival factions to see off, complete with their
own towns, resource centers and heroes.

Which brings us to the game's biggest and perhaps most
controversial change - hero characters and rank-and-file creatures
are now treated equally. In the past your armies had to be led by a
hero, but now you can move your troops around without a leader, or
have a party made up entirely of heroes with no troops to escort
them. This means that heroes are now treated as just another unit
on the battlefield, instead of standing safely on the sidelines
lobbing spells at the enemy and using their special abilities to
boost their army's chances.

Making Life Easier

Heroes are still the heart of any good army

In practice this is less flexible than it sounds, because heroes
still completely dominate the game. A small army led by a powerful
hero can easily destroy a much bigger force, as their own ability
scores are added to those of their troops.

Because of this armies without a leader are ineffective against all
but the weakest of foes. They can't capture towns or buildings
either, which relegates them to mopping up stray resources. The
only real advantage of this new system is that you can now easily
transfer fresh troops to your heroes without having to go back to
the nearest city to collect them. This is aided by the addition of
caravans, which can move units from one city to another
automatically, or even allow you to buy troops from remote barracks
under your control and have them delivered to the town of your
choice without having to mess around visiting the barracks in
person.

The creation of new units has been simplified as well, with a
slightly less bewildering array of options open to you. New
buildings can still be added to cities to give you access to new
types of unit, with each faction having its own unique city
graphics and selection of troops. But whereas in Heroes III you
could upgrade most types of barracks to unlock a more powerful
version of the unit generated by that building, Heroes IV does away
with this. While this reduces the choice of units on offer it does
speed up the expansion of your towns, and it's not a great loss as
the cheaper versions of units were rarely used once you had
upgraded anyway, unless you were really skint.

Mission Impossible

This should be a walkover, as long as those cyclopses at the back don't decide to all lob their rocks at one of my heroes at the end of the first round

This streamlining of the familiar Heroes gameplay makes the later
stages of the game far less tedious and simplifies the management
of your armies and cities. Combined with a proper in-game tutorial,
the changes help to make the game a little less overwhelming for
newcomers to the series.

Unfortunately these benefits are soon thrown away, as Heroes IV
suffers from some familiar problems, the biggest of which is
mission balance. I found the first campaign almost ridiculously
easy, with most of the missions virtually impossible to lose, but
this is just to lull you into a false sense of security. Some of
the later campaigns proved incredibly hard even on the lowest
difficulty setting, and given that I've played through Heroes III
and its various expansion packs as well as the more recent Heroes
Chronicles mini-games, I hate to think what a Heroes neophyte would
make of these missions.

The relegation of your heroes to standard combat units doesn't help
matters either. In previous games your heroes could only die if
their entire army was obliterated in battle. In Heroes IV your
enemy might decide, completely at random, to throw everything it's
got at one of your heroes, and there's absolutely nothing you can
do to stop them. Battlefields are still too small and cramped to
allow any real tactics to come into play, and there's no room for
your hero to run away if he comes under attack. This tends to lead
to frustrating reloading as you have to restart a battle that you
should have won, because one of your key heroes was attacked on the
first round by fast moving flying units or missile fire before you
could move a single unit.

Abby Normal

Well, that was easy

What makes this even more annoying is that the AI is fairly feeble
most of the time. You know that your hero's death is the result of
a random number generator buried somewhere deep inside the code
rather than part of some spectacular strategy your opponent has
dreamed up.

Your enemy is equally inept on the campaign map, running right up
to your towns with a huge army and then turning away at the last
moment for no obvious good reason, leaving their own cities
undefended, ignoring resource centers, and generally acting like
they don't know what they're doing. Despite this they still seem to
level up their heroes and gather armies faster than you can, and
all too often you will get two or three hours into a mission only
for an all-powerful enemy hero to appear without warning from the
fog of war with a vast army at his side. Until this happens you
have no real way of knowing whether or not you're managing to keep
up with your opponent, and as some of the maps are absolutely huge,
winning missions can be a time-consuming business, even if you do
come out of the initial levelling race on top.

And if you get sick of playing against the AI, I'm afraid I have
some bad news for you. Heroes IV has no multiplayer support.
Apparently it will be added in with a patch at some unspecified
later date, but given the drastic job cuts which recently took
place at New World Computing we might have to wait until the first
inevitable add-on pack arrives. In the meantime you will want to
download the latest patch, which fixes some nasty bugs including
skipping music and memory leaks, as well as adding an optional grid
for the battle map. This was a standard feature in Heroes III and
incredibly useful, so the mind boggles as at how NWC managed to
leave it out of the sequel.

Conclusion

Heroes IV might offer prettier graphics than its predecessors,
although the unit animations are still laughable in many cases, but
the gameplay is, if anything, a step backwards. Mission balance is
still a mess, the designers still can't write decent dialogue,
multiplayer support has gone AWOL, and battles can be incredibly
frustrating now that your heroes are just another battlefield unit,
wide open to attack. The old Heroes magic is still in there, and
it's sure to provide a reasonable challenge for hardcore fans of
the series, but it's not the leap forwards for the series that we
were hoping for.